Recently, I wrote about numbers. There is an allure to big, round numbers. Witness the fuss we made about the 100th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s visit to Sleepy Eye.

Three hundred qualifies as a big number. You are looking at “Weeds300.” That is displayed on my computer screen in the Word program I use to cobble words together. When I began doing these for The Journal eleven years ago, I made the regrettable decision to label them “Weeds1,” “Weeds2,” etc.

I say regrettable because it is a terrible way to catalog columns. If I want to find something I wrote ten years ago, do I look at “Weeds40”? I have paper copies in a box. That’s old school, but it’s not much more helpful for finding anything. At least, it’s tactilely more interesting to page through old newspapers than clicking a mouse.

In those 300, there are several uncompleted ones. That’s like the incomplete I had in European Comparative Government my senior year at college. That’s still on my transcript in a dusty file cabinet at St. John’s. I mean to finish that term paper any day now.

Even though it’s not exactly 300 columns, I’m going to celebrate my milestone. So this is going to be a column about writing a column. If that sounds dreadful to you, feel free to skip to the obituary page. I was almost in the obituaries a few weeks ago from a tractor-semi accident. That might be a column someday. For now, I’m glad to be on this page.

My earliest foray into column writing was “Sport Light Spotlight.” Friend Bill Moran and I co-wrote that as sophomores for our high school newspaper. Sometime that winter, we decided to poke the varsity basketball team, writing that they should play smarter and with more effort.

I’m not sure what the hell we were thinking. The varsity basketball players were bigger and stronger than us. One lunch hour the basketball players rolled me up in the stage curtains and knocked me around. Bill’s dad was the athletic director, so he did not share in this affront to free speech.

Today the United Nations has an office devoted to the safety of journalists around the world. In 1972, we had no such protection. The good news is that was the last time I was assaulted over something I wrote. People have called me names, but no sticks and stones and broken bones.

I did occasional writing for the Sleepy Eye Herald Dispatch through college. One summer, a generous editor let me write a column I called “Gallimaufry.” As you likely don’t know, gallimaufry means, “a confused jumble or medley of things.” It was a more apt title than I even knew. One of those columns was about interviewing my column. Parts of my life were a bit fuzzy back then. The statute of limitations has passed on whatever may have caused that.

Then came farming, marriage, and a kid in rapid succession. I wrote some things for events and organizations I was involved with, enough to keep that part of my brain from shriveling up. In 1990, the Herald Dispatch had a contest where readers were invited to write about a Christmas memory. The Christmas before, we had come across a car crash on our way to a family gathering. I wrote about that not very uplifting topic. That led to writing a column for then editor Mark Beito which became Weeds.

There were early word processing programs around then. I’ve never been an early adapter. I wrote Weeds then on a yellow legal pad. When I finished, it was a mess of scratched out lines, arrows moving paragraphs around, and scribbled lines above other lines. Peggy Tauer was a copy editor for the paper. She deserves a medal for turning those into print.

I wrote that till Kid 2 and Kid 3 came along. My time to write dried up and Weeds closed down. I continued to write columns in my head. They got bottled up there, a kind of mental constipation. That wasn’t healthy for me.

Flash ahead some years, the kids were older, and I thought about resurrecting Weeds. The Sleepy Eye paper didn’t have need for an often-pointless column. I still had the itch, and went to see Kevin Sweeney, the editor at The Journal, to find if they had interest in a vagrant columnist from western Brown County

I knew Kevin a little bit. I went into his office and proposed what I was thinking. He quoted back something that he remembered reading of mine twenty years before. That was a cool moment for me, and 300 columns later, here I am. Kevin has retired twice since then. Clay Schuldt now gets the blame for these showing up in print in The Journal. Mike Lamb bears that responsibility in Marshall.

The best part about writing in a small town is that it leads to conversations with readers. It’s one-sided at first, because I get to say the first nine hundred words. But I enjoy hearing others’ thoughts on whatever the topic is. Occasionally someone thinks something I wrote is stupid, and that’s okay as long as they don’t roll me up in a curtain and pummel me.

As I commemorate Weeds300, I want to give credit to my inspirations. On top of that list is baseball. I never let my lack of ability in playing get in the way of loving the game. A large number of my columns are about baseball. There is something in a ballgame that is a metaphor for everything that goes on in life. In a thousand years, when our civilization has passed from the Earth, if baseball is all that remains we will have succeeded.

Other regular inspirations include farming, Sleepy Eye, the dirt below and the sky above, and God. I can’t forget God. Thank you, God.

If you read these, you know wife Pam appears almost as often as baseball. I live with her, so we bump into each other a lot. I can’t almost get through a day without her making some impression.

Pam is not looking for attention. She is a private person. She pays a price for knowing me. I have taken to rating columns by the Pam references. There are one-Pam columns, two-Pam columns, etc. If she ever wants a commission, I’m in trouble.

We’ll see how long Clay and Mike let me take up space. If I get to Weeds500, I’ll buy a round at Meyer’s.

— Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye, where he lives with his wife, Pam.